


Groundwork

by White Aster (white_aster)



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003), Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-29
Updated: 2010-12-29
Packaged: 2018-02-07 15:47:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1904715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/white_aster/pseuds/White%20Aster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames and Arthur have worked with a lot of teams in their time as extractors.  Greed's team is something of a special snowflake, of course.</p><p>-------</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Arthur shook his head, slamming down the sheet of paper as if it might contaminate him. "No. NO. Not him. Not his team. No."</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>"Ah." Eames couldn't help the smile. "I see you've worked with them before."</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Groundwork

_AUTHOR'S NOTE: A crack crossover drabble that got away from me._

\-------------

"Merry Christmas," Eames said, dropping a sheet of paper on Arthur's desk before dropping himself into a nearby chair. "List of contacts for the Bradley job. I hope you don't mind that I didn't put Ariadne and Yusuf on there. And about the forger--"

"Oh god no," Arthur said.

Eames blinked at him. "What?"

Arthur shook his head, slamming down the sheet of paper as if it might contaminate him. "No. NO. Not him. Not his team. No."

"Ah." Eames couldn't help the smile. "I see you've worked with them before."

Arthur tapped the sheet. "Find someone else."

"There isn't anyone else. We need another forger, and he's one of the best."

"Kaplan."

"On a job in Malaysia."

"Suki."

"Got married and left the business last month."

"...Prokov."

Eames rolled his eyes. "In jail in--"

"--Siberia, yeah, fuck, I remember. ....Giovanni."

"Oh, come off it. We both _hate_ Giovanni, because he's an unreliable little shit. Look, I know that these guys are annoying, but they're what we need. Forger and a handful of extractors. They already are a team, already work well together. It'll save us time. Bradley's going to China next month, we've got to get moving on this before--" 

"I know!" Arthur scrubbed his hands against his face ruthlessly, then took a deep, calming breath. "I know. All right. Fine. Fine." He glared at Eames in a manner that was usually reserved for marks and unreasonably inept baristas. "But I am taking an extra five percent of your cut, to put up with the sexual harassment."

\------------

"So this custom compound we're using...you come up with it?"

Yusuf looked up. While he'd been crunching numbers, the black-haired scary one from Greed's team had sauntered over. Not that they weren't all scary, including the woman who smiled like a wolf, but something about this one reminded Yusuf of some of the more unstable compounds he'd worked with.

Yusuf nodded. "I did, yes. I'm sorry, I think I missed your name."

"Kimberly." He offered his hand, and Yusuf shook it. Kimberly straddled one of the rolling chairs next to Yusuf's bench. "So, how more stable of a dreamstate are we talking about?"

"Moderate. Say, two, three more people can stay in a single-level dream without straining the construct." Yusuf spread his hands. "Lacking anything exciting, of course."

"Of course. The compound itself: what is it?"

"It's a variant of somnacin, optimized for--"

"No, no," Kimberly interrupted, waving his hand impatiently. "Not the dumbed down version. What _is_ it? What's the structure?"

Yusuf smiiled knowingly. "...ah, you're a chemist."

Kimberly quirked his lips in a half-smile of his own and shrugged. "In the academic sense. I don't usually have the time or equipment to experiment much these days. Still curious, though."

Yusuf looked at him for a moment, measuring, then figured what the hell. It wasn't as if he was going to patent the bloody thing. "2,4-diamino--ah, hell, it'll take longer to say it that to just...." Yusuf flipped back in his notebook until he found the synthesis reaction written out, sprawled across facing pages. He folded the binding back on itself, showing the products but conveniently hiding the reactants. A scientist had to keep some of his trade secrets, after all.

Kimberly leaned over, eyes crawling over the proffered page. After a moment, he sat back, looking impressed. "That must have been a bitch to purify. You'd have enantiomers all over the place, and a few of those side products are--" He tilted a hand, wiggling his fingers in a messy gesture.

"--horribly poisonous, yes." Yusuf found himself smiling. "It took a bit. The reaction conditions are key, of course, and an extra distillation step afterwards. It took a few tries, but I was able to get it pure." He flipped a few pages, to where the peaks of an MS readout sprawled across the paper. "Put it through the mass spectrometer myself."

Kimberly raised an impressed eyebrow. "Pretty." He folded his hands over the back of the chair. "I'd be interested in learning how to make it. When you work with this many people--" he flipped a hand over at where the rest of his team was talking with Arthur and Eames, discussing something that obviously required a lot of frowning on Arthur's part "--having a more stable dream's always a good thing." 

Yusuf hesitated, and Kimberly smiled. "I'm willing to trade, of course." He reached into his pocket and pulled out an unmarked vial filled with colorless liquid. He set it down on the bench with a click. "One of my own formulas. Maybe even something we might want to use a bit of on this job." He gestured for a marker and started drawing on the plexiglass top of the bench, short, sharp strokes resolving into the multi-ringed structure of a somnacin derivative Yusuf wasn't familiar with. Kimberly tossed down the marker. "It increases the empathic connection about twofold. Get a mellow dreamer like Law over there, and you can calm the subject to some degree. Makes the projections a bit less antsy."

Yusuf studied the structure, mind working backward through the likely synthesis reactions. "Ah, I see you have experience with poisonous side reactions."

Kimberly spread his hands. "All in the reaction conditions."

They studied each other for a long moment, and then Yusuf smiled. "All right. We share, we try out the syntheses, and we give both sets of products a live test before we're finished with the job. Fair trade."

Kimberly smiled, and they shook on it. "Fair trade."

\------------

"Look." Arthur rubbed the bridge of his nose. "All I'm saying is that three point men on this operation is going to get confusing."

Martel snorted. "We get three times as much done. Dorochet and I manage it all the time."

"We'll be stepping all over each other!" Arthur protested.

"Well," Martel said, raising an eyebrow at him over the stack of folders on her desk, "that's why we share."

"Yeah," Dorochet said, reaching under his own desk and coming up with an ethernet cord. "Look, I set us up a network, and we have a shared folder that we dump all the intel into. That way we all know what we're working with."

"Easy as pie," Martel said, smiling.

Arthur looked over at Dorochet, who waggled the end of the ethernet cord at him temptingly. Arthur huffed a laugh. "I am _not_ plugging my computer into a network with yours. Forget it."

Martel's grin widened. "Aw, don't you trust us? Look at that, Dorochet, I don't think he trusts us. Doesn't that make you a sad puppy?"

Dorochet did a fair sad puppy impression, lower lip pushed out and the ethernet cord drooping in his hand.

Martel pushed away from her desk, her chair rolling away as she stood and stretched. "Or maybe he doesn't think we're careful. Maybe he thinks our computers are...dirty. Full of nasty viruses, just waiting to infect him." She paced closer, more predator in her stride than Arthur was used to. It made the hair stand up on the back of his neck, though he didn't show it. 

Martel slid up behind him, much closer than was necessary to get to the coffeepot on the table. He felt the stretch of muscle in her chest and abdomen as she reached, then reached again for her cup. "Don't worry," she murmured in his ear. "We use protection."

"Every time," Dorochet said, nodding solemnly. "Can't be too careful these days."

"Yeah." Martel finished pouring and, and Arthur could see the muscle in her arm bunch and cord as she reached over to set the pot back on the burner. The brush of her hip against his ass as she moved back around him had to be deliberate. "Speaking of which, did you see that Bradley's changing his flight plans again?"

It took Arthur a psychologically crucial second to realize she was talking to him. "...Wait, _again_?"

"Yes, again." Martel rolled back close to her desk. "See, if you were hooked up with us, you'd know--"

"Email. Me. The info," Arthur gritted out, moving back to his desk.

"Email. So cute," Martel said. 

"Very old-school," Dorochet agreed.

Arthur, as he sat back down, decided that Eames owed him way more than five percent to put up with this. 

\------------

Ariadne didn't know why she'd been surprised that the big man, Law, was their architect. God knew that looks didn't mean anything, but his bicep was as big as her head, and Ariadne was willing to bet that he didn't get that by sitting around building mazes.

At least he didn't give her as much crap as some others she'd worked with about being young. He listened quietly as she took him through the layout she'd constructed (a city reminiscent of Central City, laid out in a circle maze), then followed her as she took him through it down below. When they came back up, she asked, "Do you think it's too complicated? I know Bradley's going to be militarized, but...."

Law shook his head, the cot creaking as he stood and walked over to the model. "It's excellent. In fact, I'm going to make it a bit more complicated."

"Really? How?"

"Connections here...and here...." Law pointed at two spots, then several others. "And a few other places."

"What kind of connections?"

"More direct routes."

"O...kay." Ariadne bit her lip as she studied the model. "So where are you going to put the extra halls?"

Law's finger touched one spot, then arched over the model to touch the other.

"Oh! So like a bridge. Well, a network of bridges. I get it, now. That's going to be a long haul, though, to go over them."

Law shrugged. "It doesn't have to be."

"Well...you still have to cover the space, right?"

He smiled. "If you're going to ignore physics when you build, why not the laws of space and time, too?"

Ariadne looked back at the map. "So...wait. So you mean to make the halls short. Open door here, walk ten steps, come out door over here?" She curled her hands in the air in front of her, miming folding the landscape on itself. Of course. She'd _done_ that, though she'd never thought of using it to allow quick access in quite that way....

Law pushed up from the table and shrugged, watching her patiently. "Why not?"

"Be...cause. It." She stopped, really thinking about it. Why not, indeed? She looked down at the model, the maze lifting in her mind's eye, curling in on itself, hallways tangling and wrapping around each other. "Okay, I can see how you could do it, but it'd be less like memorizing a maze and more like...I don't know, memorizing a...a ball of yarn. It'd be more a tangle than something linear...wouldn't it be really hard on the dreamer, memorizing that?"

Law nodded slowly. "The dreamer has to be good. Not everyone can do it."

Ariadne looked at him, then smiled. "Oh. I see. That's why you, then."

Law's lips quirked in modest amusement. "The boss can do it, but he prefers to concentrate when he's forging. Kimberly can do it, too, but he's a shitty dreamer. He's too...something. The projections find him faster than any dreamer I've ever seen."

Ariadne looked back down at the maze, trying to imagine the changes that Law had described, a smile spreading across her face. The very idea that you could do this changed _everything_.... "So...when you've made the changes...can I see?" She gestured over to the cots hopefully. "I've got to see this, now."

Law smiled slowly, the corners of his eyes crinkling. He nodded.

\------------

"Aaaw, look, our kids get along," Greed said, grinning as he rolled his chair over to knock into Eames'.

Eames looked up. Ariadne and Law were coming back up after another round on the cots, the model next to them now strewn with pipe cleaners for some reason. Yusuf and Kimberly were both in lab coats and goggles, peering at something in a beaker that smoked in a pungent and faintly alarming manner. Arthur, Dorochet, and Martel were all clustered around the central whiteboard, bickering over what looked to be the world's largest and most colorful hierarchical list.

"Hm," Eames said, smiling slightly. "I wouldn't have called you if I didn't think they would."

"Oh, I don't know. Arthur was pretty pissed at me last time." Greed stretched, sounding entirely too pleased with himself.

"And you've behaved yourself quite admirably," Eames noted. He looked up at Greed, amused. "We're all professionals here."

"Sure." Greed grinned. He jerked his chin over at the PASIV, now abandoned as Law and Ariadne had gone back to gesture over the city model. "How about a game of hide and seek? For training purposes, of course."

"Of course." Eames swept his eyes over the room, but nothing looked like it was going to explode in the foreseeable future. And it had been awhile since he'd seen Greed's forgery up close. He stood, stretching. "No rocket launchers this time."

"Aw, Eames.... You used to be a lot more fun, you know that?" Greed muttered, as they wandered over to the cots.

"Yes, yes, I'm a bore, I know." Eames sat down and grabbed one of the lines, setting the PASIV for five minutes. He smirked up at Greed. "Small arms, however, are completely allowed."

Eames pushed the button and Greed's laughter followed them as they both fell under.


End file.
